The Rules
Eight rules. Written so a 10-year-old can understand them. Written so a robotics PhD can't game them.
One Machine
One machine enters. It has a name and a version number. That same machine is tested on everything. You cannot swap in a different machine for different tasks. If your machine is brilliant at chess but cannot walk, it scores zero on walking. That's the point.
Human-Sized
No taller than 190cm. No heavier than 100kg. Must fit through a normal doorway. Must stand and move on two legs. Hands must look and work like hands — fingers that grip, not power tools bolted to arms. Comparing a warehouse-sized supercomputer to a human isn't a fair fight. A 10-year-old would call that cheating. We agree.
Carry Your Own Brain
All of the machine's thinking must happen inside its own body. No phoning home to a giant computer farm. No cloud. No WiFi brain. A human carries their brain with them. It weighs about 1.4kg and uses about 20 watts — less than a light bulb. If a machine needs a building full of computers to think, it hasn't solved the problem yet.
No Help
Once a test begins, no human can help. No one types instructions. No one corrects mistakes. No one tells it what to do next. No remote control of any kind. The machine must decide what to do and do it, just like the human record holder did.
Same Test, Same Rules
The machine faces the same conditions the human faced. If the human had 60 seconds, the machine gets 60 seconds. If the human used a regulation chess board, the machine uses a regulation chess board. The test must be fair in both directions.
No Cramming
The machine cannot be specially trained or reprogrammed for a single test. It must use its general abilities — the same ones it uses for everything else. Software updates between tests are not allowed during a single scoring year. The version that starts is the version that finishes.
Every Category Counts
The machine receives a score in every category. There are no opt-outs. If the machine cannot attempt a task at all, it scores zero. Not "excluded" — zero. This forces the machine to be general. A machine that is superhuman at 50 things but scores zero on 200 others will have a low index. That's honest. That's the whole point.
Prove It
No one takes your word for it. Every attempt must be recorded and verified. Physical tasks: continuous video from multiple angles, independently witnessed. Cognitive tasks: logged inputs and outputs, reproducible conditions. If Guinness sent an adjudicator for the human attempt, the machine attempt needs equivalent scrutiny.
Why Castlebridge?
In November 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver missed a shot at a golden plover while hunting near Castlebridge House in County Wexford, Ireland. That evening, an argument started: was the golden plover the fastest game bird in Europe, or the red grouse? No book could settle it.
That argument led to the Guinness Book of World Records — the most comprehensive catalogue of human achievement ever published. Over 150 million copies. What began as a pub argument became the world's record of what humans can do.
Seventy-five years later, a new question has replaced the old one. Not "which bird is fastest?" but "can a machine match a human?" The Human Records Index carries that idea forward.